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Scientists have been using both Diamond Light Source and the ISIS neutron source to get a better understanding of an important group of materials that can help target the delivery of drugs to the right place in the body. The materials, called Pluronics™, form water-based gels which can be customized to control their structure and how they flow, important considerations in controlling how and when the drugs become active.
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Highly anisotropic graphene materials such as aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) forests, oriented CNTs arrays have been universally considered as an excellent electrode for electroanalysis because they make predominant use of the highly reactive edge planes in contrast to the nearly inert basal planes. However most aligned CNTs contain metal catalysts, which are also a possible source of their electrocatalytic activity. Therefore the extent to which the electrocatalytic properties are affected ...
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Bacteria that develop resistance to drugs can cause great problems in the treatment of infections and diseases. Multi-drug resistance bacteria pump the drugs out of their cells through membrane proteins known as transporters. To reveal the structure of these proteins and understand their mechanism it is necessary to isolate the proteins, grow crystals and collect data at powerful X-ray sources. An early success at Diamond Light Source has been achieved with crystals of the multidrug efflux ...
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It’s a stressful life for bacteria. Bacillus subtilis commonly lives in soil, where it’s under daily attack from heat, acid and salts in the soil. Scientists have been using Diamond to understand how the bacterial cells respond quickly to rapidly changing environments to survive. This research has been published in the journal Science.
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The p53 gene is a tumour suppressor gene, in other words its activity stops the formation of tumours. It is therefore a key protein in the cell’s defence against cancer. Mutations in p53 are found in most tumour types, and so contribute to the complex network of molecular events leading to tumour formation. This tumour suppressor is in fact mutationally inactivated in around 50% of human cancers. Approximately onethird of the mutations lower the melting temperature of the protein, leading to ...
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Membrane proteins are essential for many biological processes in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. In the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli), a protein called YaeT selects and folds other proteins before inserting them into the outer membrane of the cell. Tim Knowles and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham have been using Diamond Light Source to study protein solution structures in order to understand the processes by which they are targeted in the cell, and how they ...
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Liquid crystals are a state of matter that possesses some properties of liquids and some of solids. Their use in display screens is familiar, where the optical properties of the substance change in response to applied electric field. However, liquid crystals can form a wide range of very complex phases, and scientists have been using Diamond to study perhaps the most complex liquid crystal structure so far observed. This work has been published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.
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All living things propagate through the process of cell division. Histone proteins play a vital role in this complex process, but the exact molecular mechanisms that make it possible are not well understood. Histones act as spools for DNA, allowing it to wind around them to make compact packages that fit neatly into cells. Scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, have been studying how histones interact with a chaperone protein to answer the ...
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Shigella flexneri is a bacterium which causes dysentery, resulting in a million deaths worldwide every year. To infect humans, it uses a complex molecular machine which attaches itself to a host cell and uses a needle to pierce the cell membrane and deliver proteins that hijack cellular processes to facilitate infection. Scientists from the University of Oxford have been using Diamond to study how the machine identifies a host cell and triggers the transfer of proteins. This work is ...
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DNA is constantly under attack. Within the human body there is an army of proteins which can detect when DNA has been damaged and attempt to repair it. One such protein is Helicase XPD.
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During normal healthy cell division, the cell goes through a series of checkpoints to prevent abnormal or damaged cells from proceeding with division. But if one of these checkpoints is defective, chromosomal instability can result, leading to the growth of malignant cells. Scientists from the University of Manchester have been using Diamond to study a protein called Mps1, which regulates the number of chromosomes during the cell cycle, making it a potential target for new cancer treatments.
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Multiferroics are materials in which ferroelectric and magnetic orders are closely related, opening the possibility for tuning the first one with the other and vice versa. This class of material has attracted recent interest for their potential applications in memory devices and other electronic components. In addition there is a drive from a more fundamental perspective - to understand the fundamental physics that give rise to these exotic properties. By combining x-ray diffraction studies ...
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Professor Trevor Rayment and Dr Alison Davenport from the University of Birmingham have used the Microfocus Spectroscopy beamline I18 to carry out X-ray studies of corrosion that may help corrosion scientists understand the phenomenon of pit corrosion.
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Scientists from Newcastle University have solved the first de novo crystal structure of a protein using diffraction data from Diamond Light Source. The researchers successfully crystallised a protein called RsbS from the bacterium Moorella thermoacetica, and solved the crystal structure to 2.5 Å resolution.
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Metal oxyhydroxide nanoparticles form in many natural (e.g. rivers) and contaminated land environments. These mineral particles are an important part of the global iron cycle and, due to their high surface reactivity, adsorb large amounts of dissolved species onto their surfaces and into their structures during formation. These processes significantly influence the distribution, speciation and bioavailability of trace elements in many natural systems. This is particularly relevant in ...
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Zeolites are important nanoporous materials with many applications, including use in laundry detergents, as industrial catalysts and for cleaning up nuclear waste. Zeolites have a cage-like structure which enables them to trap charged particles called cations. Scientists from the University of Birmingham have been using Diamond to investigate new ways of locating cations and nanoparticles within different types of zeolites, this is important in order to understand and improve their use.
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Diamond Light Source, the UK's world-class synchrotron facility, has welcomed the first users to its new Test beamline. Researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, have used the Diamond synchrotron to take a closer look at industrial diamonds as a means to test their latest collimator technology.
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Thin films produced by depositing pre-formed size-selected gas-phase nanoparticles are an important class of materials, particularly because of their application in magnetic memory. A team led by Chris Binns at the University of Leicester worked with the team on the Nanoscience beamline to study the magnetic properties of Fe thin films produced by this technique and compared them to Fe thin films produced by conventional techniques. Their results have been published in the Journal of ...
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Tuberculosis is a major cause of death worldwide, killing over 1.5 million people each year. Understanding how the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes disease in humans and how it survives in the body could provide the key to combating this killer disease. Scientists from the Universities of Oxford and British Columbia have used Diamond to determine the structure of a protein called HsaD, which enables the tuberculosis bacteria to survive in the human body. Knowing the structure of ...
